Moderate tribesmen in parts of militant-ravaged north-west Pakistan are challenging Taliban extremists threatening to overrun their area, in what could develop into a mass resistance movement.

Villagers in parts of North-West Frontier province and the tribal territory, faced with the violent advance of the Pakistani Taliban, are starting to organise an armed indigenous resistance in the absence of help from the state.

The resistance has parallels with the "Sunni awakening" in Iraq, where tribesmen took on al-Qaida militants in Anbar province and elsewhere.

The Pakistani movement relies on tribal customs and widespread ownership of guns to raise traditional private armies, known as lashkars, each with hundreds or several thousand volunteers.

These tribal armies cannot stop individual acts of terrorism, like the devastating suicide bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad last week that killed more than 50 people. But they aim to stop the development of an extremist mini-state in the north-west.

The lashkars are appearing in many areas, including Bajaur, in the tribal zone, and Dir and Buner in North-West Frontier province. The Taliban are heavily armed and entrenched in a line that runs along the Afghan border from South Waziristan, north through Bajaur and Mohmand, in the tribal area, and in adjacent districts in NWFP, including Swat.

"There's going to be a civil war, " said Asfandyar Wali Khan, leader of the Awami National party, which runs the provincial government in NWFP. "It will be the people versus the Taliban."

Last weekend, in Dir, a narrow valley in the province sandwiched between Taliban strongholds in Bajaur and Afghanistan on its west side and more militants in the valley of Swat to its east, around 200 elders from the Payandakhel tribe came together in a traditional meeting, or jirga. In the dusty front yard of a high school, rousing speeches were given that resulted in a resolve by the elders to assemble their own lashkar. Anyone sheltering Taliban in the area would be severely punished, they decided. "The government forces cannot even save themselves, what good will they be to us? " Malik Zarene, an elder, told the crowd.

Many of the men at the jirga came with machine guns, some dating from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The meeting was a reaction to a scare a few days earlier, when a group of Taliban tried to seize a local school and take 300 children hostage. Without waiting for the authorities to act, tribesmen successfully tackled the assailants.

Those at the jirga said they had watched with horror in recent years as extremists had pounced on next door Swat, which used to be a tourist destination. A full-scale army operation in Swat since last November has not managed to quell the insurgency there.

In Dir, the local tribes have demanded that the army not be deployed, saying that the presence of uniformed men only galvanised the Taliban and provided them with ready targets. The army has agreed.

In southern Dir, the Sulthankheil tribe raised their anti-Taliban lashkar a month ago in villages around the town of Khall. There, 10,000 locals registered to serve. Every night 20 armed men patrol each village with orders to shoot intruders. "If we had not formed this lashkar, we could soon be like Swat," said Akhunzada Sikandar Hazrat, a Sulthankheil tribal chief.